Adaptation and psychometric investigation of the Gameful Experience Questionnaire (GAMEFULQUEST) in Brazilian Portuguese

Over the years, the use of questionnaires has become one of the most used methods for analyzing individuals’ experiences. Especially in the area of gameful environments (e.g., games, gamification, and simulators), the Gameful Experience Questionnaire, a self-report instrument to measure gameful experience, became one of the most popular. Despite the instrument’s popularity, there is no Brazilian Portuguese version, preventing studies from being carried out in Brazil (i.e., a country with more than 200 million inhabitants), where only 5.1% of the population have adequate English comprehension skills. To face this challenge, we conducted a cross-cultural adaptation of the Gameful Experience Questionnaire, providing a version of the questionnaire in the Brazilian Portuguese language. For this process, we conducted a mixed-methods (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) psychometric study (N = 384) organized in six steps (i.e., (i) translation, (ii) synthesis, (iii) experts evaluation, (iv) target audience evaluation, (v) adapted instrument application, and (vi) validation (i.e., confirmatory factor analysis)). The results indicate that the cross-cultural adaptation took place efficiently, where the resulting instrument maintained the psychometric properties of the original, measuring the construct of interest with similar effectiveness (i.e., χ²/df = 2.4, RMSEA = 0.061, CFI = 0.991, TLI = 0.989, GFI = 0.986 and SRMR = 0.061), enabling its application with Brazilian Portuguese speakers. With this study, we contribute to researchers and practitioners in the field of gameful environments by providing an instrument to measure gameful experience in the Brazilian Portuguese language.